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Democrat Charlie Crist began a three-day campaign swing Wednesday, leaving Tallahassee in a school bus after ridiculing Republican Rick Scott for cutting $1.3 billion from classrooms his first year as governor.

Joined by running mate Annette Taddeo, Crist headed for Jacksonville after a small-scale kick-off rally a couple blocks from the Capitol. Crist said Floridians wanted a governor committed to improving public education.

“Education is the most important investment we can make to provide high-quality, good-paying jobs for Florida students and all Floridians,” Crist said, adding, “We’ve got to get the priorities right.

“You know, we don’t have a revenue problem. We have a priority problem in Florida. The priority needs to be education. It needs to be our hard-working school teachers.”

Crist has been endorsed by the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, which has clashed with Scott through the years. The state’s highest per-pupil spending also was reached Crist’s first year as governor.

Although Scott slashed school spending his first year as governor, he followed that by getting the Legislature to increase classroom spending by $2.5 billion the past three years while also assuring that teachers got pay raises last year.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Shalimar, was dispatched by Republican leaders to attend Crist’s capital event and was quick to cloud the Democrat’s promises. He said that while Crist was the state’s Republican governor from 2007-11, Florida’s economy tanked and school spending was steadily reduced.

“Florida lost hundreds of thousands of jobs under Gov. Crist, we’ve added hundreds of thousands of jobs under Gov. Scott,” Gaetz said. “If Gov. Crist thinks education is the issue he can run on, he’s sorely mistaken.

“Education funding was cut by $1 billion under Gov. Crist. Right now, students in Florida are able to get $370 more under Gov. Scott’s budget than they received in Gov. Crist’s last budget.”

Crist plans stops in Orlando and Tampa on Thursday, in the heart of the state’s Interstate 4 campaign battleground before completing the tour Friday in Miami.